Furniture Returns Are Both Consumer Nightmare and Business Dream

If you’re sitting in a chair as you read this sentence, consider this question: What will happen to the chair when you no longer need or want it? It will likely end up in the garbage – unless you choose to upcycle, donate or sell it.

Americans generate over 12 million tons of furniture waste (sofas, mattresses, chairs, tables, etc.) every year according to 2018 data, says the Environmental Protection Agency. Over 80% of it ends up in landfills.

At the same time, supply chain delays are wreaking havoc on American shoppers – big-ticket furniture items included. A customer who purchases a made-to-order couch today online can expect to wait for three to six months – or longer – for delivery.

The Growing Business of Furniture Returns

The good news is there’s a movement happening to change both sides of this problem, which aims to provide retailers with a dual solution that manages their bulky returns while simultaneously powering a reCommerce business. That solution is the work of Austin, Texas-based technology company FloorFound, a two-year-old startup that’s looking to keep bulky furniture items out of landfills while helping its retail partners manage two major headaches – and also reversing wasteful consumerism.

FloorFound – which recently partnered with Joybird, a unit of La-z-Boy Incorporated, to help consumers sustainably remove unwanted furniture – provides retailers with the tools they need to reclaim and resell merchandise in an environmentally friendly manner. Some of the dozen or so other brands partnering with FloorFound include Feather, Floyd, Castlery, Inside Weather and Sabai.

This business model – once confined to apparel and smaller luxury items – is a no-brainer for brands like ThredUP, Patagonia and Urban Outfitters. But large items (like furniture, as well as appliances or exercise equipment) have been prohibitively difficult to ship, return, store, and ultimately resell and redeliver … until now.

FloorFound, which has perhaps cracked the code on how to take a sofa out of one person’s world and bring it into someone else’s to maximize each product’s time in use, lets retailers streamline a costly and complicated returns process. It’s one that includes all customer-facing aspects: transportation, inspection, processing and warehouse storage – and then a whole new customer transaction, ultimately delivering to anywhere in the U.S.

As Chris Richter, CEO and founder of FloorFound, told PYMNTS, direct-to-consumer (D2C) furniture retailers like Joybird, Floyd and (new this week) Burrow credit their reCommerce programs with delivering new revenue and customers. What became very clear to Richter at the front end was the return value proposition – turning returns into resale. Regarding FloorFound’s work with Floyd to launch a branded reCommerce storefront, they’ve already seen an 80% reduction in overall carbon emissions for line hauls and a 72% average gross recovery. The average time to sell is a reported eight days.

Richter was personally frustrated himself when he wanted to purchase furniture after remodeling a house and wasn’t able to buy anything in a retail store that could be delivered in fewer than two or three months. The floor samples appealed to him. “Why can’t I shop for these on the website now?” he wondered. “Why don’t they share this with a nationwide audience?”

“So, I kind of put all those dots together and said, ‘What are retailers missing out on today?’ Well, they’re missing out on selling these resale items that are within their possession.”

From Problem to Potential

Most shoppers – 92%, Richter said, quoting a FloorFound survey – have bought resale online before, mostly from Facebook Marketplace, The RealReal, Poshmark and the like. “We’re not trying to make resale buying mainstream,” he said. “It’s a smart thing to do, because otherwise [products] are going into landfills.”

“It was very clear that the only way we’re going to get retailers to adopt this en masse is to change the economics around returns,” Richter noted. FloorFound now has a nationwide network with about 30 warehouse locations.

Reaching New Audiences

For millennial and Generation Z shoppers, resale furniture is appealing. With inflation rising for goods like furniture, cars, housing, and food – the bare necessities of life – younger consumers are now grappling with high prices on goods “for the first time since they’ve been old enough to notice,” per The New York Times. FloorFound (literally) doing the heavy lifting drives this process.

“Let’s say a client is in California, buys a sofa and wants to return it. The client drops us what we call a ‘reCommerce’ request — a notification saying they have this item that can go into our eCommerce inventory, but it’s got to go get picked up from this customer’s house. They just drop it into our system and then we handle everything else in the end,” Richter explained.

“So, there’s no lift on their side. We’ve taken away the headache of trying to coordinate with the customer and trying to ensure a good customer experience for the return pickup. We manage all of that and where to send it – like if it’s picked up in California, it’s going back to our location in California. So that reduces the carbon footprint of the transportation.”

New Opportunities

It’s common for destroy rates to be high for returns, and for recovery rates to be lower than hoped. As much as the return quandary is ubiquitous within the retail industry, most sellers of big, bulky items have yet to get on the bandwagon, and are missing out on an opportunity to blend furniture with reCommerce while also appealing to customers’ planet-saving sensibilities.